As momentous as the murder ofGeorge Floydwas, Nekima Levy Armstrong was not particularly shocked when she first heard the news. “Was it a surprise that the Minneapolis police department killed yet another unarmed Black man? No,” she says. “There had been a series of circumstances in which they had used deadly force unjustifiably.” As a civil rights lawyer, past president of the Minneapolis National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a spokesperson for the local Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapter, Armstrong was all too familiar with such incidents. Owing to her standing in the city, she was also one of the first to learn of Floyd’s death. She was in for a long night.
Armstrong was at home with her family that evening. It was Memorial Day, 25 May 2020. She saw that an activist friend had tagged her in a Facebook post. “Someone had told her that MPD [theMinneapolispolice department] had killed someone by choking them or crushing their throat,” she recalls.
This was within hours of Floyd’s death. At around 8pm that night, as police bodycam footage later showed, he had been pulled from his parked car outside a grocery store by police officers, on suspicion of having paid with a fake $20 bill. He was apologetic, confused and anxious. He resisted attempts to manhandle him into a patrol car, saying he was claustrophobic and asking them to put him on the ground outside instead. Then commanding officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine and a half minutes, ignoring Floyd’s repeated pleas that he could not breathe, until he was dead.
Armstrong searched for more information online. Finding nothing, she called MPD chief Medaria Arradondo. Armstrong had a good relationship with him; Arradondo, the city’s first Black police chief, was trying to reform the MPD. The two of them would often communicate when incidents of police violence happened. “I said: ‘Hey, Rondo, did MPD kill someone today?’” she recalls. “And he’s like, ‘No, Miss Nekima, not that I know of.’ Basically, ‘MPD didn’t kill anyone today, but someone died as a result of a medical emergency.’ And I said: ‘Are you sure?’ And he said: ‘Well, that’s what they reported.’”
Knowing the MPD as she did, Armstrong was immediately suspicious. “I went directly to social media after my call with him and let people know: something happened … This is what the chief said, now we need to see some video.” Soon after, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier tagged Armstrong when she posted her now infamous 10-minute video, documenting Floyd’s murder in all its tragic, drawn-out callousness.
Armstrong cannot forget seeing that video: “I was horrified. I wept after looking at that. I knew I had witnessed a murder – a very egregious murder, and what I felt was a racially motivated murder at the hands of those who were supposed to protect and serve. I also saw that the police treated George Floyd as if he were expendable, just an object, not a human being.” Equally horrifying to her was that the crowd, mostly African American, pleaded with Chauvin to stop, but felt powerless to intervene, “because the reality is that they would have been, at a minimum, arrested, but potentially also shot and killed … So that also was just very disturbing to me – that this type of regime was in place.”
She spent most of that night on the telephone and social media. She got a call from the mayor, Jacob Frey, apologising for what had happened. Arradondo asked her to come to a meeting at City Hall at 7.30 the next morning with Black leaders and law enforcement officials. She also called Jess Sundin, another well-known local activist. “I said: ‘Jess, I think we need to plan a protest.’” This was in the midst of the Covid outbreak, when public gatherings were being discouraged. But, “after seeing that video, I’m like, Covid or no Covid, I don’t know who will show, but we have to go out there. And Jess agreed, so we were on the phone together in the middle of the night, putting the first demonstration together in honour of justice for George Floyd.”
After a short nap, she arrived for the morning meeting at City Hall. Then Arradondo held a press conference where he announced he was firing Chauvin and the three other officers involved – itself an unprecedented step for the MPD. Armstrong spoke shortly after him. She applauded his swift action, but also demanded that the officers responsible face criminal charges for Floyd’s death. “I was on high alert that if things go the way that they normally do, these officers are going to be acquitted,” she says.
The MPD already had a long history of racial discrimination, abuse and killing innocent Black men, and its actions were rarely punished. In 2013, police shot and killed 22-year-oldTerrance Franklinin south Minneapolis, following what they claimed was a violent altercation. They were acquitted at the time but the MPD later settled a lawsuit by Franklin’s family.
In 2015, two MPD officers shot and killed 24-year-oldJamar Clarkafter they claimed he had tried to grab one of their guns, though eyewitnesses gave different accounts. The killing sparked an 18-day occupation outside the 4th precinct police station and the blocking of a local freeway, during which Armstrong was arrested. In July 2016, 34-year-oldPhilando Castilewas shot in his car by an officer. His passenger’s recording of the incident, which also went viral, showed he had posed no threat. The officer wasacquitted of all charges. In 2017, an MPD officer shot and killedJustine Damond, an unarmed white Australian woman, who had called for police assistance. Her killer served 38 months in prison.
In most cases like this, says Armstrong, the police argue that their actions were a split-second decision, made in fear for their own safety, and are given the benefit of the doubt. She knew that no such excuse could justify Floyd’s killing: “This looked like they went and got somebody and rounded him up and lynched him.”
The protest was packed that first day, Armstrong recalls. Chanting “I can’t breathe”, the crowd marched from the site of Floyd’s death – which is now named George Floyd Square – to the 3rd precinct police station, where the offending officers were based. By nightfall, the situation was escalating. Some protesters started throwing rocks at the police station and spraying graffiti; police came out in riot gear, and used flash grenades, pepper spray and rubber bullets. Over the next few days the city descended into rioting, looting and arson; the police station itself was burned down. The National Guard was called in three days later. Armstrong had no further part in organising the protest, but she was teargassed as she attempted to bring in medical supplies.
She cannot condone the violent protests but she can understand them. Having grown up in Los Angeles, she remembers the infamous police beating of Rodney King in 1991, which was captured on video and again provoked riots. “As a kid, I saw what can happen when the police inflict violence and harassment on our community. Where there’s no accountability, where the system doesn’t work, people take matters into their own hands.”
Armstrong, who is now 48, wanted to be a lawyer since she was nine years old, she says, partly as a result of having moved to LA the previous year. The eldest of five sisters, she was born in Mississippi, but her mother moved to LA seeking better opportunities (she got a job with the state social security department; Armstrong’s biological father remained in Mississippi). They lived in South Central, a low-income Black and Hispanic neighbourhood. This was the time of the so-called “war on drugs”, and police involvement was high. But her schoolteachers recognised her academic ability and, without her knowledge, put her forward for A Better Chance – a scholarship programme for people of colour. As a result, she spent the rest of her education at an elite, predominantly white boarding school in Massachusetts.
It was a culture shock, she admits: “I was thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’ But as I learned how their system functioned, the way that people thought about things, it just opened me up to a whole new world. Also, just because of some people’s ignorance around low-income people, Black and Latinos, it made me want to dive more into my history to understand.”
From there it was back to Los Angeles for university, majoring in African American studies, followed by law school in Illinois. Then, in her early 20s, she was hired by her former dean to run a family law clinic at the faith-based university of St Thomas, which is what brought her to Minnesota. The Twin Cities – Minneapolis and Saint Paul – had a reputation for being liberal and progressive. “That’s what I thought I was moving into, but once I put down the mainstream papers and started reading the Black newspapers, that’s when I was like, ‘Wait a minute. This is the Jim Crow north,’” she says, citing the pre-civil rights system of racial discrimination in the southern US. She saw similar levels of racial inequality everywhere: “Educational disparities, socioeconomic disparities, police, community issues, and I just said to myself, like, how is this the same place? This doesn’t make any sense. This is like a tale of two cities.” After meeting NAACP elders in the city, “I was convinced that I needed to focus on civil rights”.
Her work took her as a legal observer to Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, where protests over the police killing of another Black man,Michael Brown, spilled over into violent riots. It was the event that catalysed the formation of BLM as a sustained movement. On her return she helped found a local Minneapolis BLM chapter. (In 2015 she prescientlytold the Washington Post: “Minneapolis and Ferguson are closer than you think. The ingredients are here for that kind of uprising.”)
The scale of the BLM protests in response to Floyd’s death, across the US and across the world, overwhelmingly peaceful, surprised even Armstrong. It was one of the largest protests in US history. A year later,Chauvin was tried and convictedof unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Armstrong played no part in the trial, but she had campaigned to raise the initial charge against Chauvin from just third-degree murder – on which MPD officers had avoided conviction on previous occasions.
In 2020, she led a public protest outside the residence of the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, demanding more robust charges and that all four officers be charged. As a result, she met Walz and conveyed her view that, in the interests of a stronger prosecution, the case ought to be handled on a federal level, by the attorney general’s Office, rather than on a local level by the county attorney’s office, which had a history of failing to hold police to account. “The governor, by the grace of God, actually listened.”
Five years on from Floyd’s death, with Donald Trump back in the White House, the picture no longer looks so bright. The political backlash against BLM began almost immediately. At its peak in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center, support for BLM in the US was 67%; by 2023 it haddropped to 51%. Trump himself was never a fan. In 2020, he reportedlyordered the militaryto “beat the fuck out” of BLM protesters and even shoot them. Already in his second term, the teaching of Black history is being suppressed, DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives have come under assault, prominent Black officials such as US air force general Charles Q Brown Jr have been demoted, includingFBI officialswho took a knee in support of BLM back in 2020. Rightwing commentator Ben Shapiro even called on Trump topardon Derek Chauvin. In March this year, in what felt like a symbolic moment, the huge Black Lives Matter mural painted along a street a block from the White Housewas removed.
“Now we’re in a place where it seems like we’re going backwards, as a result of what’s happening with the Trump administration,” Armstrong says.
That doesn’t mean Floyd’s death did not result in lasting change. “We saw laws change in various jurisdictions; we saw more police officers being prosecuted and even convicted, along with vigilantes who had killed Black people – that was a huge shift from the norm.” In the wake of the convictions for Floyd’s killers, hundreds of police officers left the MPD. “You had folks who were there for decades, who participated or who were silent, who I feel are just as guilty, who are part of that baked-in culture of violence and abuse,” she says. “That to me, gives the department and the city an opportunity to start fresh.”
There is still plenty of fighting to do and, like it or not, Armstrong is evidently very good at it. But she does have a life outside her work, including five children. Can she keep going? “I mean …” she laughs. “I would love to not feel that I have to spend so much of my life taking on these systems, and people within the systems. It’s not that they can’t do the right thing; they lack the political will a lot of times, and they fail to see our humanity in this society and in this community.
“But I think about the people whose shoulders I stand on, the folks who came before me, who fought with just their faith and their knowledge that something needed to change.” She speaks of the civil rights struggle and the fight to end the Jim Crow laws, ofRosa Parksand Martin Luther King. “When you have folks like that who have persevered and fought against all odds and who didn’t have the modern conveniences that we have access to, it’s like, who am I to complain about the struggle for justice when it’s something that we as a people have inherited? So I feel that it’s part of my responsibility to continue to use my voice.”
Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd is in UK cinemas from Friday and on BBC iPlayer and BBC Two on 21 May